No single individual in German letters did as much to form the way Germans thought about their past as did Jacob Grimm. His research among medieval manuscripts laid the foundations for subsequent rese...
Read more
In the following essay, Lüthi analyzes the Grimms' version of "Sleeping Beauty" and considers other variants of the tale.
Our attitude toward fairy tales (Märchen...
Read more
In the following essay, Ihms details the lives of the Grimm brothers and investigates the political and social dimensions of their fairy tales
The stories now known as Grimm's Fairy Tales ap...
Read more
In the following essay, Tatar discusses the common traits of the Grimms' fairy tale heroes: naiveté, compassion, fearlessness, and humility.
There comes an old man with his three sons...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Bottigheimer probes gender distinctions related to transgression and punishment in Grimms' Tales.
A general pattern of exculpating men and incriminating women perme...
Read more
In the following essay, Thomas examines the nature and significance of the Grimms' fairy tales.
As the great-grandparent of children's literature, fairy tales occupy a privileged plac...
Read more
In the following essay, Dégh assesses the influence of the Grimms' Kinder-und Hausmärchen.
Are oral and literary tradition two separate entities which can be studied independen...
Read more
In the following essay, Ward decries the lack of an objective scholarly evaluation of the Grimms' fairy tales.
One occasionally encounters the contention that the Brothers Grimm were guilty ...
Read more
In the following essay, Zipes offers a socio-historical perspective on the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, examining the ways in which these stories depict the social customs and...
Read more
In the following essay, Kamenetsky describes folktale character types in the Grimms' tales and presents Wilhelm Grimm's view of the significance of folk stories.
Mythical and Epic Dime...
Read more
In the following essay, the Davids advocate approaching the tales as imaginative literature rather than as folklore. Examining the Grimms' approach to nature and art, the critics consider the t...
Read more
In the following essay, Carsch considers both implicit and explicit references to the devil in the tales, arguing that the Grimms used the figure as a form of social control to "exemplif[yj the...
Read more
In the following essay, Snyder discusses the Fairy Tales in relation to German nationalism and the Romantic movement, focusing on how the tales present positive, praiseworthy traits common to the Germ...
Read more
In the following essay, Bottigheimer, one of the tales' leading modern scholars, examines the role of spinning women in several of the stories, identifying two distinct viewpoints in the tales....
Read more
In the following essay, Zipes examines both the social and political messages of the tales and the attempts of later German writers to adapt them according to their own political agendas. Zipes also c...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Ellis examines the changes the Grimm brothers made to their source material, arguing that the Grimms' nationalism motivated them to promote the tales as specifically G...
Read more
In the following essay, Tatar examines both heroes and heroines in Grimm's Fairy Tales, arguing that, contrary to "conventional wisdom," the protagonists (males in particular) are...
Read more
In the following chapter from her book The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, Kamenetsky considers the response to the tales in the context of the Romantic movement and the Grimms ' broader inte...
Read more
In the following essay, Haase discusses the importance of each individual reader's response to Grimms' Fairy Tales, suggesting that "the recipient and context of reception are as ...
Read more
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm
Critical Essay by Max Lüthi
